


Plausible Deniability

by SMJB



Category: Original Work
Genre: Conspiracy, Creepypasta, Gen, Horror, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:15:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27900628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SMJB/pseuds/SMJB
Summary: A group of friends manage to fight off a horde of zombies, but one of them realizes that something isn't right about the whole situation.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	Plausible Deniability

“Hey, you know all that footage you got?”

“Um, yeah, kinda hard to forget.”

“Have you done anything with it yet?”

“I was just about to start editing together something for youtube.”

“Okay, great. Don’t. In fact, delete that shit off your phone and tell no one what we did this weekend.”

“No way, dude! First, why would we _not_ tell people we saved the world from a zombie apocalypse? Second, even if for whatever reason we didn’t want the fame and notoriety, I want something to back up my story with when the sheriff comes ’round all like ‘Hey, there, son; do you mind explaining to us why we found thirty-seven dead bodies all up at your family’s cabin in the woods?’”

“Good point; we should go back and burn the bodies.”

“Dude. Slow the fuck down and explain to me exactly what it is you’re talking about.”

“Alright, look. I’ma try and explain my reasoning from the beginning.”

“Yes; please do.”

“The thing what’s been bothering me since this whole crazy adventure began is that these zombies were, in fact, zombies. They weren’t _like_ zombies, they weren’t _close enough_ to being zombies to earn the title, they weren’t something we were _calling_ zombies for lack of a better word, they didn’t have an arbitrary percentage of the traits we _associate_ with zombies--they were honest-to-God, Romero-style, shambling, moaning, shoot-’em-in-the-head, don’t-let-’em-bite-you walking corpses.”

“Okay? And?”

“Do you have any idea how crazy it is that the supernatural exists and it just so happens to map perfectly to something what’s already in pop culture? That’s like if aliens landed tomorrow and they were literally, non-figuratively the Ferengi from Star Trek. Were that to happen, would you be like ‘Wow--what a coincidence!’ or would you be like ‘What did Gene Roddenberry know and when did he know it?’”

“Okay, so you’re saying that Romero knew that zombies are real.”

“Him or someone whispering in his ear--it don’t really matter which.”

“I’m not seeing why that means we should pretend this never happened, though.”

“Think about it: Zombies are a known thing. Someone out there knows about this and the way they decide to warn the public about it is under the guise ah fiction. Why would they do that instead of just...you know, telling people zombies are a thing?”

“I don’t know, maybe Romero didn’t want to be seen as a crackpot.”

“Ah’ight, let us explore that theory for a moment. Romero personally saw zombies at some point in his life and used his fiction to warn us about them because he was too pansy-ass to face a little public ridicule. Unless zombies went extinct shortly after he encountered them and a new batch ah ’em was spontaneously created, like, last week, zombies have been real and shambling about the US this entire time. And unless zombies have some sort of anti-decay property which would be wildly out of keeping with what our noses were telling us, it ain’t been these specific zombies that entire time, less’n they broke out of a deep freeze somewhere. So clearly they’ve been replenishing their numbers. So clearly people have been encountering ’em.

“So why hasn’t anyone else come forward with their story by now? We ain’t nothing special--we can’t have been the first to survive. So why didn’t stories ah zombies start cropping up here and there almost immediately after the movie? Eventually there shoulda been enough ah them what Romero woulda been comfortable being like, ‘Oh, yeah; this shit is real, BTW.’

“But that obviously never happened. Why not? More importantly, how not? Like seriously, how long does a zombie even survive in the wilderness--people have to be becoming the walking dead fairly regularly just to stop the strain from dying out. There is only one logical conclusion: the survivors are being silenced.”

“Dude, are you serious?”

“Well I suppose there’s also the whole stored on ice until they escaped--or, more realistically, were released as part ah some sorta sick experiment--idea, but that hardly exactly points _away_ from there being some sorta vast conspiracy at work here.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Is anything I said wrong? Point out the wrongness ah any specific thing I said, please. Show me exactly where my logic breaks down, because I’d _love_ to be wrong about this.”

“I mean, I guess it doesn’t, but...dude.”

“‘But...dude’ ain’t an argument.”

“Okay, but...why?”

“I don’t fucking know--maybe the zombies run on some sort of secret magical bullshit the elites don’t want us plebs knowing about. We ain’t got nothing to go on there.

“But say you is some sorta secret organization what, for _whatever_ reason, don’t want us knowing about zombies. You still don’t want ’em to spread out of control, however, because zombie apocalypses are bad for business, and avoiding this can be helped by giving the people some sort of warning about what to look out for and knowledge of what to do if zombies do show up in their town. How do you do that without blowing your cover? Embedding that warning in a work of fiction and then maybe using whatever influence you have to make that work very, very popular seems like it’d do the trick. Hell, it even comes with the additional bonus that you have a ready-built explanation for any sort of consistency in any stories that do pop up from time to time.”

“Okay, yeah, I’m not saying that doesn’t make sense, because it does, but we’re making a lot of assumptions here. Like, how do we know that these people are evil?”

“Well, that’d be because the _one_ thing we know about ’em is that they’re willing to, at the _very_ least, _risk_ human lives by making their warning all cryptic and shit rather than admit to the world that zombies are real. Like, these zombies weren’t objectively that hard to beat if a bunch of drunk rednecks could do it without anyone getting hurt; I doubt they’d still exist after all this time if the public were properly mobilized against ’em--and yet they’re willing to suffer ’em to exist, killing who knows how many people who’re all like ‘Okay, this drooling, shambling stinking person is admittedly sketchy as fuck, but like...zombies can’t possibly be real, right?’ per year, all in the name of keeping their precious secrets. From there, it ain’t that huge a huge leap to making the bodies yourself.

“Like, okay, maybe they’ll just take our shit down and make us sign NDAs, and maybe they have some sort of neuralizer technology--but that ain’t a risk I’m willing to take, so let’s just keep off their radar, shall we?”

“...Look. I’m not deleting the footage, because if the sheriff comes ’round I want something to corroborate my story, men in black be damned, but I won’t publish or say anything outside that context.”

“Thank you, man. I suspect that we won’t be seeing law enforcement even if we leave the cabin as it is--though I don’t wanna test that theory.”

“Guess we’d better call the others, then.”

“Yeah. Heh.

“You know, another little thought I had--if there are other supernatural threats out there, there ain’t no reason these people, whoever they are, couldn’t have pulled the same trick with them, and it suddenly seems awfully convenient that the trope of the heroes of the story being all like ‘And then we never told anyone about this spooky, supernatural shit because no one would believe us,’ goes back at least as far as Dracula.”

“Shit, are you telling me you think there are wolfmen and Frankensteins and shit out there?”

“I didn’t think there were _zombies_ out there, and yet this weekend went and disproved _that_ little theory! So yeah, who the fuck knows what else is out there, waiting to skull fuck us in our sleep?! Who the fuck knows?!”

“Woah. Calm down.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s alright.”

“It’s just...this weekend was hard, willingly going back out there to clean that shit up is going to be harder, and the world is a lot scarier place than it seemed to be just last week.”

~

“...”

“...”

“Dude...where did they go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Thirty-odd bodies don’t just up and disappear.”

“I know.”

“I mean, I suppose we don’t know a damn thing about real zombies, so maybe they do?”

“I kinda doubt it?”

“Like, we didn’t imagine it. I recorded it and everything!”

“I know.”

“So, what? Did your men in black get there before we could? Or did the zombies just...get up and walk away?”

“Probably the scarier of the two options, I expect.”

“Which option is scarier?”

“I don’t know.”


End file.
